After the Bell: Is the appearance of honesty the best policy?

22 Feb 2023

Some people regard it as a positive error if you are in politics and you have a sudden outbreak of honesty, because then your opponents can and will use it against you forever.

If you are a politician, is dishonesty the best policy? In life, of course, people avow that honesty is the best policy, a phrase often attributed to US founding father Benjamin Franklin. This is not to suggest you should be brutally honest in all situations; small, white lies are obviously considered to be an exception.

But it is the best policy for very obvious reasons: sincerity, trust and realism are contingent on being honest. Franklin was known to be honest in business, as his Puritan values dictated, and became a successful printer on the back of the trust his approach to life generated. This remains true for so many businesses, prior and subsequent.

It’s worth noting that, in theory, dishonesty is a one-way street because in the real world, a hundred truths don’t mitigate a single lie, or at least not completely. Once you have been caught lying, finding your way back to being regarded as honest is an uphill battle. Just ask Boris Johnson.

So at this point, the cynics climb in. There are thousands of jokes about honesty being the best policy. A favourite is a cartoon that shows two businesspeople, one saying to the other: “It’s a concept we like to explore, but I wouldn’t describe honesty as company policy, as such.”

But I think the most quoted response to the notion is this: “I have found that the appearance of honesty is the best policy.” This brings us to politicians.

We don’t really expect politicians to be honest any more; the notion is considered “unrealistic”. And it goes further than that: some people regard it as a positive error if you are in politics and you have a sudden outbreak of honesty, because then your opponents can and will use it against you forever.

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All of this comes to mind because Wednesday was Budget Day, and I couldn’t help noticing that the Treasury had reduced its estimate of real annual GDP growth to 0.9% for the 2023/24 financial year.

That is a pretty brutal pruning, especially considering that GDP growth of 2.5% had been pencilled in for the 2022/23 financial year. The decrease was invoked for an absolutely obvious reason: rolling blackouts.

In his speech, Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana referred, as he was obliged, to The Problem That Cannot Be Ignored. “The lack of reliable electricity supply is the biggest economic constraint,” he said. “Record levels of load shedding were experienced in 2022 — 207 days of load shedding compared to 75 days in 2021.” The government, he promised, intended to fix the problem, and hence the government announced a whole range of initiatives.

These included the well-telegraphed decision for the government to take over R254-billion of Eskom’s debt, which means Eskom won’t have to raise any debt on its own for the next few years. Of course, that means the government’s debt-to-GDP ratio will probably rise to 73.6% from the previous estimate of 71.1%.

This is all well and good, but what strikes me about it all is how little self-reflection is evident about how and why SA got into this position. When I raise this with my colleagues and friends, they think I’m the one who is out of line!

No politician in the modern era will ever admit a mistake, because if they do, it would be forever used as a stick against them. You would, in this view of the world, just be providing ammunition to your opponents. Actually, I have found that many companies have the same policy. Rather gloss over some issue than speak the plain truth, even when the plain truth is there for everyone to see, perhaps especially if it’s plain for everyone to see. It is what it is. That’s the modern approach to “explaining” something.

So obviously, I realise there is a risk of a TikTok meme out there of some politician admitting to some failing that is forever recycled at every opportunity by his or her opponents. Social media has quietly inverted the law of the lie: now, instead of a single lie obviating a hundred truths and diminishing a person’s prospects, the single truth can perform the same service.

But when the situation is so obvious as it is now in SA, doesn’t that change the situation? Nobody is in any doubt about why SA’s economic growth is stunted; why not just say, “We made a series of terrible mistakes, now we are going to correct them and prove to you we are still worthy of your trust.” Wouldn’t you, as a politician, get some kind of credit for that?

It’s sad, but apparently not. DM/BM

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